


Resurrect

by sweetheartmercy (babybrotherdean)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Gen, Horror Elements, Pseudoscience, Video Game Mechanics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 10:08:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12252213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babybrotherdean/pseuds/sweetheartmercy
Summary: The very first attempt is a catastrophic failure.-Angela dabbles in the science of life and death.





	Resurrect

**Author's Note:**

> I had a thought and I wanted to explore it. More notes on it at the end, I guess. Kind of inspired by [this art](https://sweetheartmercy.tumblr.com/post/165558135973/lemoncholy-wip).
> 
> Disclaimer: I'm only very loosely in the Overwatch fandom, and have a very vague understanding of the lore and... whatever else. Be gentle.

The very first attempt is a catastrophic failure.

It’s Angela’s own curiosity that drives her to dabble in the science of death. Not the first thing, perhaps, but it’s certainly the one on which she chooses to focus. There are other factors, of course; the cries of those who’ve had to face the loss of loved ones on the battlefield, the ever-present part of her heart that wants to minimize suffering, but at the end of the day… she pins it on curiosity. Calls it a pet project; research to be done on the side when she isn’t busy with the daily operations of Overwatch.

That’s how it starts, at least.

Mankind has been trying for centuries to unlock the secret to beating death, to reversing it. Though minor success has been made, in the restarting of failed hearts and the countless other measures taken to prolong human lives, much of the work that’s been done can only hope to delay the inevitable. To find loopholes in the body’s operations and slip through them to hide from the grim reaper for another short day.

Loopholes.

With the study of nanobiology, leaps and bounds have been made in the field of medicine, and Angela… Angela wants to see how much farther it will go.

It’s simple enough to start experimenting, playing around with the technology she has and testing its limitations. She’s certainly experienced them firsthand, often with much frustration, so it’s no doubt that they exist- advanced as Overwatch’s biotech may be, there are certain things that they just aren’t able to fix. Ailments they aren’t able to cure. Accidents they aren’t able to undo.

She’s never much liked the thought of being limited by technology, but it gives her boundaries to work with and rules to bend. She tampers with the devices she has available, pushing each and every one to its possible limitations as she fiddles with the laws of the universe, and the chance to test it-

Well, there’s certainly no shortage of death in this particular line of business.

Nobody knows about her experiments yet, not even her closest colleagues- she doesn’t tell anybody now, either, not when she’s uncertain about the viability of the technology, and maybe that speaks poorly on her character. She focuses on her oath, though, instead, on _do no harm_ , and she tells herself that she has the best interests of her patient in mind.

(She decidedly does not think about _above all, I must not play at God_ , because she does not like the heaviness with which it sits on her chest.)

Her first attempt is a secret, a quiet addition to the way she chooses to deal with a newly deceased agent. Nobody she knew personally; just another young man in a line of many, always eager to prove themselves in the line of fire. She’s alone, and she’s careful- locks the door of the examination room, closes the shutters on the window for good measure. It’s nothing she hasn’t seen before; a bit of metal lodged in just the right part of the body to bring its functions to an untimely halt, and it’s exactly what she needs for her test.

The thing about nanobiology is that it so largely depends on the presence of living tissue; without the guidance of living cells to direct repair efforts, progress is slow and undirected at best, and a complete waste of time and resources at worst, when it ends up causing horrid growths on the bodies of the deceased as the technology tries to compensate for a lack of instruction. It’s been Angela’s greatest struggle in her work thus far, trying to work around the technology’s natural limitations, but- but it’s worth a try. It’s worth pushing the boundaries of science and nature if it will allow her to prevent future loss of life.

So, for now, she begins with the dead soldier on her examination table, and she goes to work.

It’s first a matter of redirection, as she wonders if focusing on the revival of the brain will ensure the success of the procedure. She puts her attention on that and goes to work, monitoring the progress of the patient as the technology goes to work, but as the minutes tick by and it becomes increasingly evident that she isn’t getting any kind of response…

Well. A disappointing result, perhaps, but miracles don’t happen overnight.

All the failure does is send her right back to the drawing board, reworking her plan of action- examining the nanobiological technology at her disposal more closely and picking it apart, going all the way back to her masters’ thesis and digging into figuring out the point at which such an intervention can no longer be effective- figuring out which parts of the brain and other vital organs must be stimulated in order to restore life to somebody who’s had it torn away.

After a handful of attempts that are similar to the first, with no results to speak of, Angela comes to the conclusion that a field test will be much more conducive to her research.

It must be the rapid decay of cells after death. It’s the only factor that she can identify as a confound in her experiments; the bodies come to her, at best, several hours after death, with cold, grey skin, and no hope of revival. Brain cells die too quickly to be recovered, but perhaps with a fresh corpse…

In pursuit of her research, she takes to the battlefield.

It isn’t hard to talk her way onto a field mission, though much of her work takes place in a controlled laboratory these days, and it isn’t unfamiliar when they touch down. The sound, the smell, the chaos- a part of Angela had missed it, she thinks, as she follows her comrades into the fray and takes up her assignment of searching for survivors.

She makes damn sure that they’re taken care of and evacuated before tracking down somebody beyond the point of saving.

There’s a young boy, trapped under a chunk of rubble. She catches him a handful of minutes too late, no pulse to be found and his body mangled. She fights the instinct to turn away and goes to work, instead; it’s not hard to free him of the debris, and then it’s just a matter of arranging her equipment.

She’s hopeful, first. He can’t have been dead longer than thirty minutes, and seeing how young he is- children are always better at bouncing back than adults, and surely, there’s a mother somewhere, a father, _somebody_ waiting for this child to come home, and it’s hard to stifle the excitement that comes from the potential of such a heartwarming reunion, the performance of such a medical feat-

Perhaps it’s that excitement that clouds her judgement so profoundly as she begins the procedure, starting to foster the repair of the boy’s brain and vital organs. Perhaps she’s too caught up in all the good she _could_ do to think about whether or not this will end the way she envisions it.

It doesn’t.

Angela’s comrades find her clutching the body of a young boy, caught in the crossfire- no longer dead, maybe. Not in the conventional sense. His heart beats, and his lungs perform their function as well as can be expected after the trauma he’s endured, but there’s something cold and empty in his eyes. Something hollow.

There’s nothing _alive_ about the husk she cradles to her chest. Nobody asks any questions, and Commander Morrison is the one to put the boy down for good.

_(The body can be repaired, but the mind is fragile.)_

She stops for a while after that, shaken to her core. She tries not to sleep, the boy’s deadened expression carved into the backs of her eyelids.

Morrison tries to approach her about it, more than once. She’s dismissive, and it’s easy to make excuses about being busy- it’s certainly not a lie. He gives up soon enough, and she’s left to her work once more, humbled and scared and quietly deciding she ought to stick to what she knows.

That doesn’t stop the itch in the back of her mind, though. The one that persists with the knowledge that she’s left a problem unsolved, a task incomplete- the technology is there. It _could_ work, she’s sure, if only she could hit that precise, sensitive time period before the brain is too far-gone to recover…

When she picks up the research again, it’s with renewed determination, and a heart she tries to harden against the consequences of her earlier attempts.

It’s slow going, a gradual chipping away at the ultimate problem- the point at which the human brain cannot be restored to its proper state of operations. The point at which there’s no longer a point in attempting to bring a person back from the dead, as the _person_ is too far out of reach. There’s no use to the world in bringing empty corpses back to their feet, and Angela steers hard away from achieving such a result again.

It’s in the field, again, when she finally gets to test her newest hypothesis.

It’s almost too perfect- she’s caught up in the heat of battle, trying to keep track of her comrades as they scatter across increasingly ragged terrain, and she’s just a fraction of a second too late. Watches as a bullet tears clean through a woman’s skull, bringing her to her knees before she collapses completely. Dead on impact.

Angela doesn’t hesitate.

Everything else fades away as she rushes to the woman’s side, wings flaring out behind her for the short flight. There’s a clock already counting seconds in her head, and her hands are steady as she readies her staff, newly outfitted to host the new technology.

She takes a deep breath.

The visible wound repairs itself, first, and it’s already a good sign- tissue stitching back together, bone fragments returning to where they belong. Blood loss is hard to compensate for, but it hasn’t been long since the bullet’s impact, and most of it remains in the woman’s body. All that’s left is to watch and wait, and Angela does just that, letting the technology work and hoping, _praying_ , wondering if twelve seconds was already too many-

The woman comes back with a wet gasp, and her eyes fly open. She’s fumbling for her weapon, and Angela reaches for her flailing hand, catching it tight in her own. Waits until the woman’s eyes focus, and there’s _light_ there, light and emotion and something indisputably alive, and Angela can feel her heart beating, hard and quick.

“What… what happened?” the woman whispers. Bullets still fly through the air overhead, shouts echo around them, the chaos of battle not pausing for a second- not even for a miracle. “Didn’t I- the bullet-?”

Angela doesn’t hide her smile, soft and pleased, and she squeezes the woman’s hand. “You did,” she agrees. “But- well, you see…”

She thinks about explaining what she’s done, the giddiness that comes with her success, the way she’s going to help people now, knowing what she does. She glances towards her staff, like it’ll do the explaining for her, and then she takes another moment to breathe.

“Heroes never die.”

Not anymore, they won’t.

**Author's Note:**

> I know that Mercy's resurrect ability probably doesn't adhere to canon, but I got to thinking about it, and... well, if she really did have the ability to literally _raise the dead_ , then there must have been a process to get to that point. Experiments. Failures. What really struck me was the thought of her bringing the body back to life, but being left without a person's mind- essentially creating some kind of zombie. I don't know. It freaked me out, so obviously I had to write about it.
> 
> Now, re: pseudoscience. I kind of mashed together a bunch of vaguely logical nonsense in a way that kind of sounded like it made sense, but I don't have the faintest idea about how nanobiology/technology works, or how it would work, in any case, so... do with that what you will.
> 
> Idk if I'm entirely happy with how this turned out (zero editing was done), so I might tweak it later. I just kinda wanted to get it posted and stuff. Anyways, thanks for reading and everything. <3


End file.
